A network optimization framework for fuel break planning in wildfire-prone landscapes: Accounting for fuel break failures and wildlife conservation goals

Abstract

Large wildfires are a dominant type of disturbance in North American forests that have caused significant environmental impacts and economic damages. A potential approach to mitigate wildfire spread risk is to segment the landscape with fuel breaks or similar areas with reduced fuel content. However, fragmenting the landscape may undermine other ecosystem services, such as the provision of wildlife migration routes. We present a mixed-integer programming fuel break planning model that minimizes wildfire hazard while protecting migration routes for an endangered wildlife species population (woodland caribou, Rangifer tarandus caribou ). Our model applies the network optimization concept and minimizes the expected burn area in the landscape while protecting a target proportion of the wildlife migration routes. We depict the landscape as a network of patches with fuel and track the impact of fuel breaks across a large set of predicted fire spread scenarios where each scenario is conceptualized as a fire propagation graph. We formulated the fuel break allocation as a scenario-based, mixed-integer optimization problem and used the fuel break widths to track the potential failures of the fuel breaks to contain the fire spread. We also considered a planning problem that minimized the expected area of the largest fires and fuel connectivity in the landscape. For given fire hazard reduction goals, the optimal solutions are those with the least disruptive impacts on the wildlife migration routes. We implemented the approach for the planning of wildfire mitigation in the Red Rock-Prairie Creek area of Alberta (Canada), a fire-prone landscape with the presence of caribou populations. The proposed approach reduced the wildfire spread potential in the area with a trade-off of moderate impacts on known caribou migration routes. Such a methodology is timely to help develop strategies for reducing wildfire hazard in fire-prone forest landscapes while achieving conservation management goals in other regions.

Citation

Yemshanov, Denys; Liu, Ning; Neilson, Eric W.; Thompson, Daniel; Koch, Frank H.; Gritter, Kelsey; Eguíluz, Víctor M. [editor]. 2026. A network optimization framework for fuel break planning in wildfire-prone landscapes: Accounting for fuel break failures and wildlife conservation goals. PLOS Complex Systems, 3(8): e0000117. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcsy.0000117